Well, of course it's about my life and stuff I think about. Just like a quadzillionbazillion other bloggers. I'm obsessed with God. I love beauty, enjoy absurdity, dance with despair, seek silence, and think everyone is goofy. Here's my world and what I think of it....

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Thursday, October 24, 2013

To my shame I can't remember exactly how many years it has been since
I knocked on the door of my best friend's ex wife to tell his 8 year
old son that his Father was dead. I don't do well with time. It has been well over ten years. I know it is the anniversary of his death because he died a few days after John Denver was killed and now John Denver fans post memorials on Facebook that remind me of that.

I met Joe through a practical joke. Don was the superintendent on a huge hospital job that I had taken over because the
original drywall contractor had gone bankrupt in the middle of it. I had worked for Don before on other projects and he recommended me to take over the project. Don knew my
back story. He knew how I had been a former Protestant minister, had
gotten fired and by happenstance started a construction company.

So Don called me over one day and he said, “There’s a guy
you need to meet here on the job. His name’s Joe, and he’s really
spiritual. I think you guys would really have a lot in common. I think
you’d hit it off. If you want to track him down, he’s up doing doors in
the north wing.”

So I walked down the long corridor to the north wing. Forty feet away I saw this
guy with long, blond hair standing on a ladder, slamming a metal door frame with a rubber mallet, swearing like a drunk sailor. He was the
only person doing doors, so I walked up to the ladder. He cocked
his arm to swing the hammer and he looked down at me and stopped. I
said, “Are you Joe?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “Hi, Joe. I’m Steve. I’m the new drywall contractor. Don says you like to talk about God.”

Joe says, “Yeah, that’s right. So, are you a Christian?”

And I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Okay... I hate Jesus Christ, and I hate Christians,” and he spit. I didn’t flinch.

“Cool,” I said. “We need to talk.”

Over the next months, we spent hours working together. When we
finished the job, I hired him. For eight to ten hours a day, we worked
together and talked about God. Over the months, he told me he was an orphan. At about age three he was
adopted by a charismatic Protestant minister. That was how he came to hate Christians. He was
physically and sexually abused by his father, his mother, his brothers,
his uncles, and his cousins. He left the house when he was seventeen
and became a male prostitute in Hollywood. Not because he was gay, he
said, but because there was money there. He became a heroin addict and
an alcoholic, but now he was five years clean and sober. He attributed
his sobriety to his higher power: a nebulous blob of deity and cosmic
power that could be benevolent or malevolent, depending on the whim of
the deity that particular day.

We worked at several hospitals. Whenever we’d see a grossly impaired child in a wheelchair or
somebody severely handicapped, Joe would just look at them and shake his head and say, “Hm.
One of God’s little jokes on humanity.” One of the ways Joe dealt with
his childhood was just to believe that, for some odd reason, the deity,
the cosmic power, decided to play a little joke on him, and in some mysterious way down the line, the punchline would make sense. He'd had an out of body experience once when he was nearly dead of an overdose, a "white light" encounter. He said he woke up and everything made sense... everything, including the Holocaust, babies dying, disease, hunger, war, everything. But then, he said, "I forgot it. I forgot how it all made sense, but I just know it does."

He had an obsession with knives. He had a collection of cheap switchblades, butterfly knives and Bowie style stuff. He knew it had to come from somewhere so he went to a hypnotherapist. In a session he "remembered" being in the back seat of a car watching his father stab his mother to death. He didn't know if the memory was real, but he knew his mother was dead and his father was in prison which is why he was adopted out.

In spite of all of his "worldliness", Joe had an innocence that was disarming. He could say anything to anyone, uncut, uncensored, straight up, no chaser, no preface and people would not be offended. I recall working at an art gallery and the two curators were obviously gay. Out of the blue in a conversation he just says, "So are you guys butt-f**kers?" One of them grinned and said, yeah, we're partners. Joe said, "I thought so... so which one of you pitches and which one catches?" He had an uncanny ability to read people and game-playing and would call people out on their crap, but people would just go, "Oh, OK! Thanks...."

Joe watched me go through my affair and divorce. He called me out all along the way on all the stupidity and consequences, but in the end he said "at least you got someone nice". We went through several phases together. We wore Hawaiian shorts to work for a few years. We painted our tennis shoes, wore overalls, bought guitars and amps and cruised garage sales. We played the blues in my garage. He bought a piano and practiced obsessively. He was gifted in music.

One day Joe decided he missed the taste of beer. He bought a six pack of "near beer". He drank that and went and bought two more six packs and drank them. Then he decided instead of drinking 18 beers he could get the same effect with a six pack of cheap beer. That began his decline back into vodka and heroin.

Over
the next few years he did everything he could to destroy himself and I
did everything I could to keep him from it. He lived with me. I left him sleeping behind dumpsters. I picked him up from detox in the middle of the night. I didn't pick him up and made him walk home in the rain in the middle of night barefooted. No amount of dysfunctional
or functional love could restrain him. I cannot presume to know what it
was like to wrestle with his demons, and they were legion.

His son had seen his Dad nearly dead a dozen times. He had stepped over his
urine soaked, trembling body on the living room floor of his apartment
many times. He had called 911 or me enough times to have him taken to
the indigent's detox center. But this time Josh wasn't with him when he
passed out.

Joe worked for me that Friday. He was living in a rehab and had
been clean for a few weeks again. He was supposed to get a pass and stay
at my house with his son for a weekend visit. I asked him when I should pick
him and Josh up. He said, "I have plans tonight..." I knew that wasn't good. When he was sober his son was his life.

He
and a group of his friends had scored some dope and that night they
went AWOL from the rehab, bought their alchohols of choice, and rented a
motel room. When Joe passed out no one paid attention. When someone
finally shook him, he was dead. They panicked and left his body in the room and
snuck back into the rehab. In the morning one of them anonymously called
the police. They found my phone number on a card in his wallet.

I
was on the job Saturday morning working alone. Joe didn't show up for
work. I knew he was probably drunk again. I got a phone call about ten
o'clock. "This is Sergeant --- from the Phoenix police department. Do
you know a Joe ---?"

It was a short conversation. I
was able to positively ID his body on the phone by his tattoos and
scars. I packed up my tools and drove to his ex's apartment. His ex
answered the door. I didn't say anything but I guess the look on my
face said it all. She said, "Joe?...."

Josh cried.
His ex said, "That son of a bitch". Then she cried too. I couldn't. I
still haven't. I think by the time it happened I was too ready for
it. I think the
best lesson he ever taught me was by his resistance to my efforts to save him and by his death: that is, that I am not
Jesus Christ. He died imprisoned, bound and casting himself into the
fire, and in the end all I could do was watch because I had run out of
ways to love him and, at times even prayers.

I presided over his
funeral at the rehab center. For years I was angry at the parade of guys
who abandoned him in the motel room, who came to the microphone and
wept. They were supposed to eulogize Joe, but it really wasn't about
Joe, it was about themselves "See how much I loved him..." But now I
realize they probably loved him like I did, helplessly and cluelessly
and eventually angrily because he would not validate our love for him by
staying alive and being our friend, Joe. At the intersection of
whatever within me was "real love" and Joe's free will, or his will
bound up by the sins perpetrated on him and his own sins trying to loose
himself, lies his death that still hurts in places I do not
understand. And perhaps it is best that it remains a mystery and a
conviction of my own finiteness and lack of faith and understanding.
For that gift I am still grateful.

Somehow Josh found
me on the internet a couple years ago. I got an email from him. He's probably in his early 20's now and has
moved out of state and is doing well. He asked if I had any pictures
of his Dad. I had two.

This one is a Polaroid of us in
front of my 1952 bread truck/work van probably taken around 1990. My
ex didn't like my deer head over our fireplace so I mounted it on the
front of my truck. One Christmas Joe and I decorated it with a wreath,
Christmas balls and a wired a red light glued on the nose that lit up when the
key was turned on. The Christmas decorations never got taken off.

We
were working at an office building one day and one of the office
workers complained that she was staring at the deer head out her window
and was offended. The building manager came and told me I was
technically in their office parking spaces so I had to move my van.
When I went out to move it, there was a vacant general parking space
immediately behind my van and I backed it up 15 feet into it. The
building manager laughed and said, "You're legal." Yeah, I can be
passive aggressive.

Eventually some kids stole the deer head in the middle of the night and the van broke down irreparably, probably out of grief.

This is another Polaroid that we took with the Easter Bunny
when we were working at a mall one year. Joe put on his "Easter Joy"
face for the picture.

So, if any of you who read the blog pray for the
departed, please remember Joe for me. I don't remember him often enough
after all these years. But our friendship is such that he would tell
me that I'm a shitty Christian and he expected so much from me... and that he doesn't mind because he would do the
same if the tables were turned.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

After eight weeks of physical therapy after my knee replacement I was able to get my knee and the rest of my leg over the seat of my motorcycle.

There is, I think, an existential addiction to a motorcyle. I straddle a two wheeled machine propelled by more horsepower than my 1962 Volkswagen van had. The only thing between me and my death is about a quarter inch of rubber on the asphalt, gyroscopic physics and blind chance. A sixty mile an hour wind pummels my skin through thin cotton threads. Cloth is my only protection from a catastrophic lapse of attention by me or someone else sharing the road. Even though I ride with awareness and care, my entire existence is unprotected, unlike my car, by a cocoon of sheet metal and air bags. The possibility of death is palpable. There is a certain freedom in hurtling through the air on two wheels and teasing death. I wonder if the Harley Davidson has replaced the late life affair for post-midlife-crisis men. I remember a line in Moonstruck where Cher asks her father "why do men cheat" and he said, "Because they die". I think that is also why old men these days spend 30K on a dressed out Harley or an Orange Country chopper instead of a trophy mistress. It really is about death and ego.

I recall that Sigmund Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." But I know a motorcycle, unlike cars might be in some cases, isn't just transportation.

I don't know what my $1,800.00 "bobber" (it's a poor man's chopper, I suppose) says about me, but I know it is a late life infatuation driven by some inner necessity I'm delving into. My wife is a patient woman.

Riding a "bobber" was an initiation into a club that I didn't know existed. As I rode, I noticed that bikers coming from the opposite direction would give a "salute", an extended arm with two fingers in a "peace sign", palm forward. They were always on some kind of cruiser or chopper.

People on scooters or crotch rockets don't "salute". (Though some rice-rocket riders will give a two fingers lifted off their throttle in acknowledgement). It is pure "tradition" by osmosis from what I can gather. When you get a bike, no one hands you a "motorcycle catechism" that teaches you how to kiss your mechanic's ring, identify the hierarchy of Harley's or Harley posers, what to wear, etc. It seems most of biker tradition is assimilated by just being a biker. And, yes, I picked up on the "salute" after a couple of drive-by's and I salute even though I know I have no clue who that was or that it matters whether or not they think I'm a dope, oblivious, or a poser.

There is something innate within us that succumbs to being included in an exclusive "club", and being included is mostly manifested in doing incomprehensible, pointless things that take on a shared meaning. Our nature is communion, it is inescapable and manifest in even two wheeled transportation.

And a H/T to Gabebraham for this link in his comment. It was too good to leave there. Check it out.